Paper details
| Paper authors | Vandra Agisilaou, Howard Harris |
| In panel on | The Ethics of Teaching Humanitarian Studies: Classroom, real-world Practice and the Discomfort in between |
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Abstract
This paper reflects on a decade of teaching applied ethics to current and aspiring development and humanitarian practitioners, and argues that practitioner resilience can be enhanced by building what we call ‘ethical capability’. This capability comprises the cognitive and emotional resources to engage effectively with dilemmas, and to use them to make ethically informed decisions. It is grounded in the notion that ethical capability contributes to practitioner resilience because even in dilemmas (where by definition there is no outcome that is good for everyone), practitioners are able to feel that they have made the best choice they could, informed by both context and values. This paper outlines the three strands that constitute our approach to teaching ethical capability, namely understanding diverse ethical approaches, building ethical decision-making skills, and reflecting on ‘good enough’ practice. It also presents graduates’ reflections on the usefulness of the model, and invites discussion of how this could be translated to practitioners beyond our classrooms.
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